pics, words – fish
Released in 2o12, the first-person Indian Horse is a Canadian fiction must-read by Richard Wagamese. The harrowing yet joyful tale of Saul Indian Horse, the story answers the question, what did aboriginals lose by being torn from the land and put in Canada’s often brutal residential schools?
Wagamese read a passage from it and his extraordinary novel Medicine Walk at an event at MacEwan University Tuesday night, the former having been chosen by the institution as its 2013/2014 book of the year – the only such program in the country. Richard van Camp was along for a Q+A.
Thousands of students across disciplines read Wagamese’s story of hockey, abuse, broken families and ghosts on the land, participating in essay-writing contests and interacting with the author over the next week.
After reading, Wagamese commented, “The legacy of residential schools is a deep psychic wound on Canada. And so, if we’re going to move towards reconciliation, it’s not just the brown people in our midst that have to work towards that goal, it’s all of us.
“And I think if there’s one reaction that first nations and aboriginal people have to work towards in everything, it’s not something so that people feel guilty about something that happened in their grandfathers’ time, it’s not that people feel contrite and sad that all of this had to happen. It’s so that people will accept the whole flow of the story. Not just the good parts of Canada, but the sad, darker, bruising, wounding parts.
“Native people pushed for this because they want one reaction, to be able to say one word: yes.
“Yes, it happened. Yes, people were hurt. Yes, it hurts me to know that my neighbours were hurt. Yes, it means that there’s things that we have to do. Yes, we can do them. And yes, we have a strong enough vision about the nature and the scope and the resilience of this country to do it together as we should have all along.”
Wagamese and I chatted earlier in the week, here’s our conversation.
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Title pic for Web 2.o:
